Fifth Sunday of Easter

Today's text is John 8:32, read by Gentry Goode. This morning's sermon was delivered by the Rev. Dr. Phil Snider.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

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Today's scripture reading comes from John 8.32. Jesus said to them, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. May we hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

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This morning I'm hoping we can unpack something that seems to be getting more and more challenging. Jesus says, You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. But I don't know about you. In this day and age, a lot of us are finding it increasingly difficult to figure out and to trust what is true, separating fact from fiction. You scroll through your phone, you see a headline, maybe it's real, maybe it's not. You watch a video, maybe it happened, maybe it's a deep fake. You see an image, maybe it's AI, maybe it's not. And after a while, something can shift. It's not just that you don't know what to believe, it's that you're not even sure how to believe anymore. You don't know what you can trust as being real, as being true. And the best I can tell, one of these images was posted by President Trump, and the other was not. It was posted on a fake account, but I'm not even a hundred percent sure about that. But we are living in what people call a post-truth age. It can be disorienting, it can be scary, it has deep implications for our daily life. Because if we cannot trust what is true, our whole world, our whole life can feel unstable, unsteady. It's like stepping onto a bridge and not knowing if it will hold. Or putting your weight on a tree limb that you think it's sturdy, but you aren't quite sure. When we don't have that foundation, when we aren't certain where to step or how to step, anxiety rushes in to fill the gap and trying to figure out and sort through what's real, what's not real? You can almost hear the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's words echoing down from more than a century ago. Does it not feel like we are plunging continually, backward, sideward, forward in all directions? Is there any up or down? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are bearing God, who are bearing truth? Now, this anxiety and this confusion that we can feel in trying to sort through what is real from what is not real did not just happen out of a vacuum. It didn't just happen out of nowhere. It is strategic, it is purposeful. There are very real forces in our world today that want to make us feel confused, uneasy, anxious, not sure what to believe. These can be political forces, it can be tech bros, it can be cultural forces, structures of society, some that benefit from a world where truth is unclear, where things are muddy, where you don't know what to believe, and you have a hard time sorting and figuring out truth from fiction. There are folks that can benefit whenever it feels like you don't know what to trust. When we pay attention to narratives in our society today, we must pay attention to how they structure and support power. Okay, when we've become used to phrases like fake news and alternative facts, even Rudy infamously from about a decade ago saying live on camera on Meet the Press that truth isn't truth. Truth isn't truth. I'm still working on that one. I've been working on it for 10 years. You know, this isn't new. I mean, you know, going back even before a decade, you go you go back to uh George W. Bush's administration. This is when Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness. You know, it's not about facts, it's what feels right. You go with your gut. None of this is new, but it is all strategic. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, she was a Jewish scholar who lived through and then later studied the rise of Nazism in the 1930s Germany. She named all of this decades ago. She wrote, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. In other words, from this vantage point, the goal is not always to make people believe a lie, the goal is to wear us down until we stop believing in truth itself, until we don't know what to believe or how to believe. It's designed to wear us down. Because once that happens, something else can take over. Power and control. Whatever is loudest, whatever is repeated the most, starts to function like the truth. And when people don't know what to believe, when they're insecure, when they're worried, when they're afraid, when they're scared, it's easy for them to fall for the narratives that scapegoat others, that perpetuate harm, that make people feel as if all their efforts are all for naught because what does anything matter anyway? There is a reason that Donald Trump wants to control every narrative. There is a reason. It is not to tell the truth, it is to centralize power and make truth feel as if it is completely obsolete and impossible to ascertain. In this world, reason does not work, facts do not land, because this kind of system is not about truth, it is about domination. It's about sowing chaos, mostly in order to deflect attention from truth. So what we experience, this collapse of knowing, this crisis of trying to figure out what is true, what is false, separating fact from fiction, it's all designed strategically. It's part of the reason misinformation spreads so quickly. People are drawn toward conspiracy theories more and more. If it's difficult to figure out what is true, and you're having a hard time sorting through, making sense of things, you're much more likely to fall for conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories thrive whenever there's a collapse of knowing. And if this is where we are, we have to ask an even harder question. How do we determine what is true? Not just in the sense of is this a genuine image or is it made by AI? Was this truly posted by the person who it looks like posted it, or is it a fake account saying it was posted by somebody else? Hearing one thing one day and another thing the next day, or really honestly, hearing one thing in the morning and then the same person saying something different in the evening, maybe by midday? I mean, like, how do you know what to believe? How do you determine what is true? I mean, is everything just one person or another person's opinion or all of our opinions just as good as another's? Is there something true behind it all? What do we do with interpretation? I mean, we interpret scripture, we interpret the news, we interpret each other. I mean, we all interpret. It's impossible not to interpret. Even to claim that the Bible has value over another book itself is in and of itself an act of interpretation. That you're claiming a book has more authority than any other book. That's an act of interpretation. We're always interpreting. It's not a question of whether or not we interpret. A lot of times it's a matter of what shapes our interpretations. Does love shape our interpretation? Does fear? Does the desire for truth shape our interpretation? Does the desire for power shape our interpretation? If we're trying to determine what is true and we are interpreting what is true, what shapes those interpretations? Is it anything goes, everybody's opinion interpretation as good as the next? How does that work? Because not all interpretations are the same, and some interpretations are better than others. Okay, so we're like living through what some have called the death of expertise, where like a carefully researched article stands next to some random dude's blog post, where truth feels flattened, everything is just a cacophony of one person's opinion against another's. But I gotta tell you, if I'm on a plane and there's a medical emergency, I want a doctor. I want someone who's trained in the field. And if I'm on that plane and there's a medical emergency, we say I want a doctor, I want a medical doctor and maybe not a doctor of philosophy who's read Hamlet. But if I'm trying to learn about Shakespeare, I want to talk to the English professor, the literature professor, who has spent their life trying to figure out what these texts mean. I prefer that over the the person who just skimmed the Wikipedia summary of Shakespeare's life. I mean, if you need voice lessons, do you make an appointment with me or do you make an appointment with Emily? To state the obvious. And more seriously, if if I've lost someone close to me, I want to talk to somebody who understands grief. I want to talk to somebody who knows what it's like to walk through that journey. There's knowledge, there's wisdom, there's lived experience. We all interpret, but some interpretations are better than others. As John Caputo writes, even if truth is always interpreted, that does not mean anything goes. Some interpretations are careful and accountable, others are reckless and dangerous. And we have a responsibility to try to tell the difference. Because when we stop doing that, interpretation gets hijacked, it can lead to conspiracy theories, fear. And where does that leave us? If truth feels unstable, if interpretation is everywhere, if if power keeps distorting what is real, what do we hold on to? It'd be good if the sermon gave an answer. Or at least a response. And it's always good to go to a good source, like John's gospel. Jesus says, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. And I want to suggest something this morning, borrowing from a handful of theologians. This kind of truth is not just about getting facts right, as important as that can be. And by the way, very important tonight at the All-Church Youth Group Trivia Fundraiser. We want to get our facts right. It's going to be some objective questions that have right or wrong answers. That kind of stuff matters. That's an aspect of truth. And having good, verifiable, measurable criteria, that is a very good thing. Paying attention to those who have deep wisdom and knowledge in their fields, that is a very good thing. Facts matter. And if you like think about the way discourse around climate care functions in our society today. If we don't pay attention to scientists who've spent their lives work telling us the effects of our overconsumption, the finite resources of being planetary creatures, if we don't pay attention to the wisdom in the field, it's at our own peril. Measurable criteria, facts, that kind of stuff, it matters. But I also want to suggest that sometimes there's a kind of truth that is not just about getting the facts right, as important as it is to try to get our facts right. There's a kind of truth that is also about liberation, about what sets people free. This is the kind of truth that Jesus was about. When Jesus stands before Pilate, Pilate asks Jesus, what is truth? And Jesus just stands there as the embodiment of a truth that is about liberation. There is an old phrase that goes back to Saint Augustine. Fissire veritatum. It always sounds very good in Latin. Fassire veritatum. It means to do the truth, to make the truth happen. It's the idea of truth being a liberating, loving force at work in our world today, not just to believe in truth, not just to say it, but to live it into being, to do the truth, to make the truth happen, and to open yourself to that liberating truth. The philosopher Johnny Vatimo put it this way: quote, the truth that shall set us free is true precisely because it frees us. If it does not free us, we ought to throw it away. In Christianity, there's a lot of discourse about sin, trying to separate truthfulness in terms of what is right and what is wrong. Simply put, when you're trying to interpret, whether it's the Bible, Christian tradition, conversations about theology, ethical topics, whatever it might be, simply put, sin is that which causes harm. It can harm oneself, it can harm others, it can harm our planet. Sin is that which causes harm. And if we come up against any religious teaching or really any teaching in general, that leads to harm rather than to liberation and rather than to love, then it falls short of the truth of love, of the truth of liberation, of the gospel that sets us free. Truth is not so much something we possess, it is something we recognize by what it does. Does it lead to love? Does it lead to justice? Does it lead to beauty? Does it free people or does it oppress people? That is their criteria of truth. Does it free people? Does it liberate people? Or does it harm people? Does it oppress people? That is their criteria of truth. And anything that falls short of that, no matter how loudly it is proclaimed, is not the kind of truth that Jesus was talking about. So from this vantage point, truth is not just something we project, it is something that calls out to us. It is an animating force at work in our lives today. It disturbs us, it unsettles the world as it is, pointing to the world as it should be. That is why it feels so powerful when you hear words of truth. Example par excellence, Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech, I have a dream. These words did not describe reality as it was. When he talked about his dream, he was not pointing to a real community that existed, that had overcome all the problems with white supremacy and racism, and everybody was living in the perfect, harmonious, beloved community. When he talked about his dream, he was not pointing to something that existed. But he told the truth about a reality that should be, that should exist. Here, truth functions, not as a description of things as they are, but rather as that call, that spirit of love and liberation leading us into how things should be, rooted in love and liberation, not in harm and oppression. And maybe that's where we begin again, not by trying to solve every argument, not by pretending we can fix the entire information ecosystem, but by asking a more grounded question: what kind of people are we trying to be? What kind of people are we becoming? Because when truth feels fragile, character matters more. If somebody lies to you all the time in a relationship, do you trust them? No. If we have a world built in and around deceitfulness, not sure when somebody tells you something if you can believe them. There's a collapse of truth and a collapse of trust. Integrity matters. This is super random. This is maybe the most random thing I've ever said in the sermon in my whole life. Like Adam Sandler movies are not good. Oh, I didn't expect a plause for it, but probably probably deserve it. But like I was watching 50 First Dates just because it was on, and I didn't want to like get, you know how like there could be a really good show on, but but you know you're gonna have to give it a lot of time and attention. You're like, you know, like do I really want to devote the next 12 hours of my television watching life? No, you want to you want to be all in. So I'm just like, Oriel's lost, I'm in a bad mood, and 50 First Dates is on. And the premise of this admittedly dated movie is that Adam Sandler's character falls for Drew Barrymore's character. Drew Barrymore's character every day woke up not remembering what had happened in her uh recent past. So every time she ran into Adam Sandler, it was like meeting him for the very first time. Um, she had experienced something traumatic, uh, an injury, an accident. Um, and so the the times whenever she was confronted with the reality that she Had experienced this accident before. It made her not trust anybody that she did not know. But her dad was always on the scene. And as soon as she saw her dad, and as soon as he explained what happened, she could believe him, she could trust him, she could sort through things with him. Because he was a person of integrity who had showed up in her life. If there are people in our lives that we cannot trust, if there's folks we don't know who we can go to, that's a collapse of truth because it's a collapse of relationship in terms of how we can trust, who we can trust. And our integrity matters. Our integrity matters. Truthfulness is not something just about trying to connect to facts out there. It's not even something we necessarily argue for. It's something we can embody. So if our life is aligned with truth, we can ask ourselves: are we participating in truth that looks like love? Are we participating in truth that looks like justice? Are we participating in truth that looks like beauty breaking into our world? Because in the end, truth is not just something we interpret, it is something we do, it's something we do, it's something we become, it's something we respond to, and maybe, just maybe, that is how truth can live again in a world that has almost forgotten how to trust it. We don't just believe in truth, we embody truth. And that spirit sets us free. Thanks be to God.